How to support bookmarking a frameset page

To support efficient page downloading

[david752]

I am creating a Web site. I have an index.html page (http://www.accesstherapy.info/?dev) that contains a frameset. Most of the frames never change their contents (this speeds downloads to 56k modems and eliminates flicker at faster rates).

As the user navigates, changing the page shown in one of the frames, the browser's address bar (location bar, not status bar) continues to show the URL of the index.html page. If the user creates a bookmark, most browsers will return the user to the home page, not to the current page configuration.

If it helps to solve the problem, my site supports a URI that the user can use to get back to the same page configuration.

Here is an example:

[localhost...]

But I can't make the site itself navigate to such a URI because that would defeat the purpose: it would reload all the frames (unless the browser does some fancy cache checking--but I want to support multiple browsers).

Can anyone suggest a way to solve this problem? I would prefer a client-side solution, but server-side PHP is okay. (Using cookies is not a good solution; it would only work for one particular computer, and only while the cookie exists and the browser handles cookies.)

David

[IanKelley]

My answer: don't use frames.

You're right, it does decrease load times but not by much if you know what you're doing.

Bookmarks have never worked with frames. I can think of various workarounds but they all have huge drawbacks.

The other major problem with frames, as I'm sure you know, is search engines. Most of them don't understand frames and the ones that do are only in the earliest stages. Very simply, unless search engine indexing is a complete non-issue... don't use frames.

[david752]

I think I can get around the Search Engine issue by including a link to my site map page in the <noframes> section of my top-level frameset. The site map will point to all other pages.

As for speed of downloads, I am really keen on this as one way of making our site be user-friendly. I know of no other way of achieving this than by using frames.

If, for example, I construct the pages using server-side programming (such as PHP/ASP/JSP/SHTML/etc.), the entire window will have to be redrawn whenever the user navigates. If you go to the site you will see how fast navigation currently is. (Yes, I know the graphics are not optimized; that will happen later.)

So you see why I'm looking for a way to make bookmarks work.

David

[tedster]

Bookmarking and frames. Just say no, if you can. You can make flat pages work just fine -- as long as you are reusing graphics on page after page, they will be cached and there's little download problem.

I have a client with a 2,000 page site aiming for 10,000 or more, and it's all in frames. They have a BIG team working on it, and no one has a solution. And yet they continue and cannot be dissuaded.

Right now, we are working with a server-side utility that will generate a special link for the frameset configuration you are on. But you must request it -- click on the link for the utility -- and that means users must be educated about the utility. That's far from suuport for ordinary browser bookmarks.

If you do go ahead with frames despite our pleas that you come to your senses ;) the search engine issue is much more than just getting into the index. When you can get your pages in the index (Google, e.g.) the visitor links back to an orphaned page which SHOULD be in a frameset but isn't.

There is a fix for this - it takes a bit of maintenance but it's not too bad. See our generic javascript thread [webmasterworld.com] near the bottom, under the heading "FORCE MANY PAGES INTO FRAMES".

By the way, don't count on NOFRAMES links getting spidered into the future. The problem with everything that is off-page (NOFRAMES, KEYWORD METAS, NOSCRIPT, etc) is that it's so susceptable to spamming that the SEs are looking more and more for ways to devalue or ignore it.